Project Summary/Abstract:
The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets (NYSDAM) has an expansive food
safety inspection and regulatory laboratory testing program. The New York State Food
Laboratory (Food Laboratory), a division within the NYSDAM, has the mission to provide expert
state of the art analytical testing in support of food safety programs in New York State. The
Food Laboratory, through food testing, provides support to the divisions of Food Safety and
Inspection, and Milk Control and Dairy Services. It is the primary servicing laboratory for the
New York manufactured food regulatory program and is accredited to the ISO/IEC 17025
standard. The Food Laboratory has comprehensive testing programs for both foodborne
pathogens and chemical residues/toxic elements in food and beverages.
If funded for Competition A, the Food Laboratory will maintain a quality management system
compliant with the managerial and technical requirements of ISO/IEC 17025 and continue to be
accredited by a recognized accreditation body. It will also continue to expand the number of
methods and technologies within our scope of accreditation, support training of laboratory staff,
and maintain current staff resources to the laboratory Quality Assurance Unit.
If funded for Competition B, New York State Food Laboratory will maintain the Research
Collaboration Agreement with CFSAN for the GenomeTrakr network. It will continue to
sequence a mixture of four hundred (400) or more foodborne related bacterial isolates and in
real-time coordination with FDA CFSAN, deposit results, including the metadata, in to the NCBI-
NIH curated national database for enteric pathogen genomes. It will also seek partnership with
universities, government agencies, and other stakeholders to support the collection of isolates.
The NYSDAM fully supports FDA’s initiative of an integrated food safety system and is engaged
in participating in these collaborative projects that aim to improve and optimize the nation’s food
safety system.
